Palace of Treason: A Novel

Captain Dominika Egorova of the Russian Intelligence Service (SVR) has returned from the West to Moscow and the Center, the headquarters of her service. She finds things worse than when she left. She despises the men she must serve, the oligarchs and crooks and thugs of Putin's Russia. What no one knows is that Dominika is working for the CIA as Washington's most sensitive penetration of SVR and the Kremlin.

Michael Barach says:"Outstanding second novel that builds on his first"

I Am Pilgrim: A Thriller

An anonymous young woman murdered in a run-down hotel, all identifying characteristics dissolved by acid. A father publicly beheaded in the blistering heat of a Saudi Arabian public square. A notorious Syrian biotech expert found eyeless in a Damascus junkyard. Smoldering human remains on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan. A flawless plot to commit an appalling crime against humanity.

The Force: A Novel

All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop. He is the "King of Manhattan North", a highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of "Da Force". Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest - an elite special unit given carte blanche to fight gangs, drugs, and guns. Every day and every night for the 18 years he's spent on the job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps.

The Company: A Novel of the CIA

"If Robert Littell didn't invent the American spy novel," says Tom Clancy, "he should have." In this spectacular Cold-War-as-Alice-in-Wonderland epic, Littell, "the American le Carre," takes us down the rabbit hole and into the labyrinthine world of espionage that has been the CIA for the last half-century. "Ostensibly a single novel, The Company can also be listened to as an anthology of cracking good spy stories," says (Publishers Weekly).

The Winter of Frankie Machine

Frank Machianno is a late-middle-aged ex-surf bum who runs a bait shack on the San Diego waterfront. An affable Italian with a love of people and life, he's a stand-up businessman, devoted father, and a beloved fixture in the community. He's also a hit man - specifically, a retired hit man. Back in the day when he was one of the most feared members of the West Coast Mafia, he was known as Frankie Machine.

Surf City Swami says:"The Winter of Frankie Machine is a ray of sunshine"

Memory Man

Amos Decker's life changed forever - twice. The first time was on the gridiron. A big, towering athlete, he was the only person from his hometown of Burlington ever to go pro. But his career ended before it had a chance to begin. On his very first play, a violent helmet-to-helmet collision knocked him off the field for good and left him with an improbable side effect - he can never forget anything.

The Old Man

To all appearances, Dan Chase is a harmless retiree in Vermont with two big mutts and a grown daughter he keeps in touch with by phone. But most 60-year-old widowers don't have multiple driver's licenses, savings stockpiled in banks across the country, and a bugout kit with two Beretta Nanos stashed in the spare bedroom closet. Most have not spent decades on the run.

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

In 2011, a 26-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine website hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything - drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons - free of the government's watchful eye. It wasn't long before the media got wind of the new website where anyone - not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers - could buy and sell contraband detection-free.

The Power of the Dog

This explosive novel of the drug trade takes you deep inside a world riddled with corruption, betrayal, and bloody revenge. From the streets of New York City to Mexico City and Tijuana to the jungles of Central America, this is the war on drugs like you've never seen it.

The Verdict

Terry Flynt is a struggling legal clerk desperately trying to get promoted when he is given the biggest opportunity of his career: to help defend a millionaire accused of murdering a woman in his hotel suite. The only problem is that the accused man, Vernon James, is not only someone he knows but someone he loathes. This case could potentially make Terry's career, but how can he defend a former friend who betrayed him?

Tier One

John Dempsey's life - as an elite Tier One Navy SEAL named Jack Kemper - is over. A devastating terrorist action catapults him from a world of moral certainty and decisive orders into the shadowy realm of espionage, where ambiguity is the only rule. His new mission: hunt down those responsible for the greatest tragedy in the history of the US Special Ops and bring them to justice.

Beijing Red: A Nick Foley Thriller, Book 1

When ex-Navy SEAL Nick Foley travels to China to find purpose and escape the demons of his past, he instead stumbles into a conspiracy his Special Forces training never prepared him for. A mysterious and deadly outbreak ravages a remote area of western China, and Nick finds himself the lead suspect in a bioterrorism investigation being conducted by China's elite Snow Leopard counter-terrorism unit.

A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel

A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in an elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors.

Devil's Due: The Thomas Caine Series, Book 0

In this exciting prequel to Tokyo Black, Thomas Caine struggles to keep a low profile in Pattaya, Thailand. But when human traffickers start an explosive war with the Thai police, Caine finds himself caught in the crossfire. A girl he has sworn to protect has been kidnapped by this shadowy syndicate, and Caine is forced to wage a bloody one man war to get her back.

The Gray Man

Court Gentry is known as The Gray Man - a legend in the covert realm, moving silently from job to job, accomplishing the impossible, and then fading away. And he always hits his target. But there are forces more lethal than Gentry in the world. And in their eyes, Gentry has just outlived his usefulness. Now, he is going to prove that for him, there's no gray area between killing for a living-and killing to stay alive.

Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel

Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He's a normal Italian teenager - obsessed with music, food, and girls - but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior. In an attempt to protect him, Pino's parents force him to enlist as a German soldier - a move they think will keep him out of combat.

Camino Island: A Novel

Priceless F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts stolen in a daring heist; a young woman recruited to recover them, and a beach-resort bookseller who gets more than he bargained for - all in one long summer on Camino Island.

Chasing Ivan

Rumor has it there's a Russian you can turn to if you're very rich, and need dirty deeds done without a trace. The CIA calls him Ivan the Ghost because he's operated for years without leaving a trail or revealing his face.

The Miernik Dossier

The Miernik Dossier is the dazzling first novel, newly reissued, by master spy novelist Charles McCarry. In this riveting, imaginative tale, five international agents embark on a car trip in a Cadillac, traveling from Switzerland to the Sudan.

Magpie Murders: A Novel

When editor Susan Ryeland is given the manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has no reason to think it will be much different from any of his others. After working with the best-selling crime writer for years, she's intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. An homage to queens of classic British crime such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, Alan's traditional formula has proved hugely successful.

A Clean Kill in Tokyo: John Rain, Book 1

Half American, half Japanese, expert in both worlds but at home in neither, John Rain is the best killer money can buy. You tell him who. You tell him where. He doesn't care about why… Until he gets involved with Midori Kawamura, a beautiful jazz pianist—and the daughter of his latest kill.

The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal

While getting into his car on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA's Moscow station was handed an envelope by an unknown Russian. Its contents stunned the Americans: details of top-secret Soviet research and development in military technology that was totally unknown to the United States.

The Dawn Patrol

Every morning Boone Daniels is out with the Dawn Patrol: four men and one woman as single-minded about surfing as he is, or nearly. They have real jobs; Boone works as a P.I. just enough to keep himself in fish tacos and in the water. But Boone is also obsessed with the unsolved case of a young girl named Rain who was abducted while he was with the San Diego police.

Orphan X

Evan Smoak is a man with skills, resources, and a personal mission to help those with nowhere else to turn. He's also a man with a dangerous past. Chosen as a child, he was raised and trained as part of the off-the-books black box Orphan program, designed to create the perfect deniable intelligence assets - i.e. assassins. He was Orphan X. Evan broke with the program, using everything he learned to disappear.

Publisher's Summary

The start of a major career! A gripping, highly commercial espionage thriller written with the delicious insider detail and up-to-the-minute insight only known to a veteran CIA spook.

In today's Russia, dominated by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, state intelligence officer Dominika Egorova struggles to survive in the cast-iron bureaucracy of post-Soviet intelligence. Drafted against her will to become a "Sparrow" - a trained seductress in the service, Dominika is assigned to operate against Nathaniel Nash, a first-tour CIA officer who handles the CIA's most sensitive penetration of Russian intelligence. The two young intelligence officers, trained in their respective spy schools, collide in a charged atmosphere of tradecraft, deception, and inevitably, a forbidden spiral of carnal attraction that threatens their careers and the security of America's valuable mole in Moscow.

Seeking revenge against her soulless masters, Dominika begins a fatal double life, recruited by the CIA to ferret out a high-level traitor in Washington - hunt down a Russian illegal buried deep in the U.S. military and, against all odds, to return to Moscow as the new-generation penetration of Putin's intelligence service. Dominika and Nathaniel's impossible love affair and twisted spy game come to a deadly conclusion in the shocking climax of this electrifying, up-to-the minute spy thriller.

I don't normally read spy novels, but I love James Bond and Mission Impossible movies, and hubby and I were going to be listening on a road trip, so I opted for this book that sounded part spy novel, part romance.

It is written by a real intelligence agent apparently, and I can believe it, as the book had amazing details about how spies move, think, operate. These details made the story richer and fascinating, in my opinion.

The romance was definitely in there, but the reason I can't call the story really a romance has to do with the way the book was written: There is little dialogue, with the narrator telling you what characters are doing, feeling, thinking. That, plus the narrator's even, cool tone of voice kept the reader/listener at more of a distance. The romance was one aspect among many in the plot, no more no less.

I got caught up in the story because of the author's ability to build the characters (and fast!) and to make you feel you're right there. I think the story was somewhat predictable, which is strange for a spy novel (and to a newbie spy reader at that) but that did not detract at all from wanting to know the details of how it was going to play out.

I'm not sure how to rate the narrator, whether it was his reading or the author's "voice" (style of writing) coming through. The narrator was easy to understand and got inflections right on emotions when there was dialogue but overall he used an almost monotone or rather mono-emotion delivery with a cadence and pacing that was superimposed almost over the story. It did not detract from nor aid the story. In a way, it was perfectly fitting that it was cold ad distant, seeming to just "tell it like it is." Was his voice entertaining, no.

One issue I had with the audible experience was that the author tended to start chapters with this format: Mr. Smith, seeing that it was noon, headed out and.....That's not from the book! But starting the chapter with a name, and often the name is Russian and they all sound the same to me, means that I don't hear it at first and then a sentence or two later I'm wondering who is doing the action. In a printed book you can go back and look (and I also have a good visual memory) but you can't do that with an audible version (hard to find the right place to go back to) so at times I just had to listen and work it out.

Both hubby and I looked forward to getting back in the car after a pit stop to hear what happened next, so it worked great for our road trip!

This was an amazing spy story. Even at the last 10 minutes of the book, I did not know how it would end. <br/><br/>My only regret was that I don't have copies of the recipes. Each chapter ends with a recipe and some of them sounded amazing.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Dominica. Very complicated character!

Which character – as performed by Jeremy Bobb – was your favorite?

Nate! Would love to know him also.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The end. Can't discuss or it would give it away.

Any additional comments?

I wish audible would put a pdf. on the site that included the recipes.

Jason Matthews is a very competent story teller, maintaining tension and interest throughout this very contemporary treatment of the nearly century old Russo/American espionage tango. He very effectively ushers us into the world of spying trade craft and introduces us to the grey scale palette of motivation and ethical rationalization which goes with it. I had no problem relaxing and letting his developing plot carry me along for eighteen hours. I believed the story; I liked the characters I was supposed to like and I detested those I was meant to despise. All very neat and effective.

Still, when I reached the end, I realized that I had never been either surprised or intensely engaged. Nor was I ever challenged or unsettled in the way I have come to expect from Greene or le Carre. This is story telling as diversion, and even though it spends a lot of effort explaining the emotional turmoil of the protagonists, it never really managed to bring me closer than arms length to the characters. This in spite of consistently expert reading by Jeremy Bobb.

I suspect we will be hearing more from these characters, and I will probably read the next installment if there is one. There are not that many espionage authors out there who write with this level of command, and this is a beginning. Who knows where it may lead.

Great plot, great pacing.Right up there with the best, I could have done this one in just one sitting! Even the recipes seemed sinister as read in the dead pan narrators style. Somehow it really works. As the character sees things in colors, I tend to see things in flavors so this tour of exotic locals in terms of food really appeals! Mr Matthews has a great career ahead! There is room for improvement in the sex and violence scenes. The sex is a little boring and violence of the torture scenes needlessly graphic. Sometimes less detail is more effectively chilling.Having said that, this is a fast, well developed and very tightly plotted novel. Right up there with Silva, Le Carte et al, don't miss it!All in all worth the credit, unputdownable 9 out of 10! I can't wait for the next one!

I think I will need to buy this one in print also since I do want to make some of the recipes!

Where does Red Sparrow rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Although we all have read many "spy books" and besides that Red Sparrow has a bit of parallels with The Hunt for the Red October, it "reads" very realistically and draws the reader in. I loved that each chapter ended with a recipe, I thought it added some "sustenance" to the story line. I couldn't help but think if the author whose CIA background has found truth in this novel, how "bad" is it really out there in the Sparrow world? So, overall the book is great, don't let bad reviews because of the recipes at the end distract you, they add some lightness to the book. The story keeps moving and the characters, although you have "met them before", are good for a few surprises.<br/>

Did the plot keep you on the edge of your seat? How?

Yes, it did. I was well written, made you sympathize with the characters or despise the bad guys. Cliffhanger at the end!

Have you listened to any of Jeremy Bobb’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No, I have not, Mr. Bobb did a great job!

Any additional comments?

The only thing that bothered my about Dominika is that she is also secretly a synesthete who sees sound as colors as well as auras around people that clue her into their mental state. I had a hard time "buying" this. However, if you like spy stories than this book is worth a credit. I enjoyed it and would recommend it.

First time author for me and debut novel for James Matthews. It was a page gurner and I couldn't put it down. The author is a retired CIA officer and got much of the book from his background. This is a classic Russia versus the USA and it's current day. The author must've written this book 2-3 years ago but the event he decscribes are the ones going on right now in Ukraine and elsewhere. He states that Russia misses being a superpower and now being considered second class. Vladimir Putin's goal is to creat a USSR vesrion 2.0. With this backdrop the author creates some interesting characters on both sides and an intense, hard hitting story of spy versus spy. Using current events makes it even more plausible. The author is supposedly writing a second book using these characters, I'll look forward to it.

This is one of the best books I have read in years. The story is edge of you seat suspense, with a spy style love story mixed in. The writer worked for the CIA so it just doesn't get more realistic. Narration is excellent. This book left me racing back to the computer to see if Jason Matthews had other books. I could not believe this was his first. Destined to become a must read classic.

What made the experience of listening to Red Sparrow the most enjoyable?

So now I can repeat myself and say this is probably the best spy story I have ever read. Cannot wait until the sequel and...I want the recipes in written form!<br/><br/>Do try and see what you think?<br/>

Would you consider the audio edition of Red Sparrow to be better than the print version?

This is a great espionage novel, masterfully read. Deep characters, intricate plot, high quality suspense. I’m happy that 2/3 through, the seduction portions are very powerful support for the story, but few and far between. What great about the story is those few events provide a huge dimension of the story without all of the “detail”, which would be distracting. The reader does an excellent job. J Bobb is superbly matched – right up there w/ “13” by RK Morgan and the Jasper FForde novels which are very well matched with readers.

Did the plot keep you on the edge of your seat? How?

Really enjoying the story - love to see just how the plot is unfolding at every turn.

What about Jeremy Bobb’s performance did you like?

Excellent pacing;

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?